On the internet, and tv shows, all over the world, there is an entirely different culture of deaf and hard of hearing. Culture is something to celebrate. Many people don't really know that being deaf or hard of hearing has its own society really.
Recently I watched a series that had a deaf girl with hearing parents and it turned out that her biological mother was hearing, etc, but that's a different story. Throughout the series, this girl experiences many milestones and a lot of them involve her trying to bring sign language to the people who don't know it or that it's important. Even her hearing sister and family try to bring it into peoples lives around them.
Watching the show really made me open my eyes to the importance as well. I have always felt very strongly that hearing and hard-of-hearing people are completely equal but they just don't get the same opportunities. The only difference between all of us is that they can no hear in the same way we do. But this does no mean they aren't hearing at all.
When I was young my mom introduced me to sign language with a couple books she had. My brother and I were able to understand the letters and I can still do a little bit of fluent ASL today. We may not be able to throw out a bunch of words or sentences but that only makes me want to learn how even more.
The entire world should be able to communicate with each other. People who use sign language should be able to go to a restaurant and have their order taken from anybody and be understood by anybody. But instead, every day HOH and deaf people experience waitresses and other people at work being frustrated because these people cannot communicate the same way.
On Facebook there's actually a newer community popping up called 'No Captions Needed' and one thing that brought my attention to their group was a video of somebody using sign language but there were no captions on the video.
As I continued to watch, captions popped up and they brought up the fact that a lot of hearing people don't feel the need to caption their videos and this creates a barrier between hearing and hard of hearing people.
This is what the group is trying to do. Connect people and tell people that it's fine if you don't want to be part of their culture with sign language but then you need to include them by captioning things.
Though a lot of YouTuber's do caption their videos a lot of them don't and then they rely on messed up robot systems trying to figure it out so no one knows what was said in the end.
I don't know about you, but I want to be able to communicate with anybody and everybody. I think everyone should be able to have a conversation with her by mouth or by hand. And I think more people need to be aware of how many hard of hearing and deaf are around the world trying to communicate.
I myself am hearing, but I believe strongly that we should all be able to communicate with one another through language or hand.
